[pfortuny]

The “table of contents in a paragraph “ is almost compulsory in any engineering (even applied maths) paper, in most journals… As far as I can tell.

[jeffwass]

I also despise presentations that include a slide with a table of contents of the upcoming talk. It’s almost always filler.

[commandlinefan]

That was my first thought - unless you're Donald Knuth or something, you're going to have an academic advisor more or less "force" you to insert the "table of contents paragraph" before your paper will be accepted for publishing.

[anticristi]

I tend to include a footnote and link to this URL:

"The authors of this paper chose not to include a table-of-contents in a paragraph, as promited by ... ."